Rickettsia felis DNA recovered from a child who lived in southern Africa 2000 years ago

The Stone Age record of South Africa provides some of the earliest evidence for the biological and cultural origins of Homo sapiens . While there is extensive genomic evidence for the selection of polymorphisms in response to pathogen-pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, e.g., the sickle cell trait which...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications biology 2023-03, Vol.6 (1), p.240-240, Article 240
Main Authors: Rifkin, Riaan F., Vikram, Surendra, Alcorta, Jaime, Ramond, Jean-Baptiste, Cowan, Don A., Jakobsson, Mattias, Schlebusch, Carina M., Lombard, Marlize
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
45
631/158/857
631/326/41
Africa, Southern
Biology
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Child
DNA
DNA, Ancient
Genomics
Humans
Life Sciences
Malaria
Nucleotide sequence
Pathogens
Rickettsia felis
South Africa
Typhus
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The Stone Age record of South Africa provides some of the earliest evidence for the biological and cultural origins of Homo sapiens . While there is extensive genomic evidence for the selection of polymorphisms in response to pathogen-pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, e.g., the sickle cell trait which provides protection against malaria, there is inadequate direct human genomic evidence for ancient human-pathogen infection in the region. Here, we analysed shotgun metagenome libraries derived from the sequencing of a Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer child who lived near Ballito Bay, South Africa, c . 2000 years ago. This resulted in the identification of ancient DNA sequence reads homologous to Rickettsia felis , the causative agent of typhus-like flea-borne rickettsioses, and the reconstruction of an ancient R. felis genome. Ancient genomic evidence for Rickettsia felis presence in human remains from 2000 years ago reframes previous hypotheses of R. felis as a novel or emergent pathogen in modern humans.
ISSN:2399-3642
2399-3642
DOI:10.1038/s42003-023-04582-y